about the workings of the humanitarian impulse, it also enables us to counter
Rieff’s assertion with a note of cautious optimism about the persistence of our
resources of human solidarity. In the second half of the chapter, I argue that these
resources will be in high demand, in view of coming humanitarian challenges. In
particular, I argue that anthropogenic climate change precisely presents us with a
“crisis of humanity”, in response to which the argument put forward in this thesis
provides us with useful conceptual tools, but also reveals the daunting
humanitarian challenge ahead.
I Failing Better? Humanity on a Human Scale
There is little doubt that, whatever definition one employs, humanitarianism is
intimately linked to the many failures of human solidarity. That much was made
clear in Chapter 2, wherein our very idea of common humanity was seen to emerge
through a negative process of defining unacceptable suffering. Indeed, some of
these failures were seen to be professional humanitarians’ own. But while the
perspective of professional humanitarians was seen to be a useful starting point for
the exploration of the dilemmas and paradoxes that characterise the “politics of
humanity”, it also contains a serious risk of taking the part for the whole when it
comes to deciding how one might assess at any given point, whether the world has
made any progress towards becoming a more humane place.
The danger here is that because professional humanitarianism is set up to
deal with the most acute forms of human suffering, because it functions in
“exceptional” contexts, we read the progress of humanitarian concerns only
through the suffering they have failed to alleviate or to prevent. There are good
reasons for this, to do with the struggling, passionate nature of humanitarianism as
a politics of refusal, one that is prompted by outstanding injustices. But as I argued
in Chapter 3, humanitarianism is not served by seeing the world only as a place of
suffering and misery, or rather, of seeing humanity as defined only by its worst
moments. Rieff himself acknowledges that